The Accidental Billionaires - review

Jack Dikian

February 2011

I usually prefer to read the book before the movie comes out, unfortunately, this time, I saw the movie once or twice before reading the book. I was already familiar with the story line, the characters, and the backdrop the book and the movie is set against – mostly Harvard University. It is no surprise therefore that while reading this book, I would continually look for how the movie diverged from this, the sequence, who said what and when, the events that led up to launching Facebook, and asking myself, which account is closer to the facts.

I was also very interested in The Accidental Billionaires because I was curious, not only about the geneses of Facebook, but also if and how incubated start-ups have changed in the last 10 years. I spend a small number of years working on an Internet idea with colleagues, seeking angel capital, building a system, and struggling with creditors and maintaining a belief in our product. It turns out that the technology has changed, but the origins and development of a start-up to a more far-flung enterprise remain very much the same.

So despite seeing the movie "The Social Network," I sat down with Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal". Ben Mezrich has a gift for finding high-energy, strange-but-true tales and The Accidental Billionaires is no exception. Mezrich is the Harvard educated author who drew public attention when he chronicled the story of a group of MIT students who finessed a blackjack card counting system and had the kahunas to try it out in the Vegas casinos. Mezrich, also wrote Rigged, Busting Vegas, Ugly Americans, all around a similar themes.

Incomplete

Sheer Size Of Social Networks

Jack Dikian

January 2011

I fired up the laptop wanting to write a book review of Ben Mezrich’s "The Accidental Billionaires," The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, and Betrayal”, the story that inspired The Social Network Movie - and slowly started wondering about the sheer enormity of these networks. Many with millions and millions of users – all connected by friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, likes, dislikes, and on and on.

I thought instead of the book review, I’d have a quick look at the size of the more popular social network sites by the approximate number of registered users. I crunched these numbers so to compare the size of the ten most popular networks with the remaining 120 networks by size of registered users.

As we can see below the top ten sites account for some 60% (approx 1.7 Billion) of [all] registered users across 130 sites totaling almost 3 Billion users. Facebook alone has almost 0,5 Billion users.

Interestingly, The population of the world is currently about 6,896,900,000 and it is estimated that the percentage of the population in the age group of 16-64 is roughly about 64% or 4.4Billion. So almost 70% of people who [could] be using a social network are – of course this isn’t quite right as many people subscribe to a number of social network sites.

Top 10 social networks by number of registered users	Approximate Number of Registered Users
Facebook	500,000,001
Qzone	200,000,000
Twitter	175,000,000
Habbo	162,000,000
Windows Live Spaces	120,000,000
Bebo	117,000,000
Vkontakte	110,578,500
Myspace	100,000,000
Orkut	100,000,000
Tagged	100,000,000
Top ten social network sites by number of registered users	1,684,578,501
Other 120 social network sites by number of registered users	1,300,370,463
Total of top 130 social network sites by registered users		2,984,948,964